MWC 2016 LIVE: Mobile has power to tame transaction fees – PayPal CEO

For billions of people across the world, even the simplest financial transactions can be either extremely time consuming or very expensive, which PayPal president CEO Dan Schulman said is “just crazy” in a world of high mobile and smartphone penetration.

In his keynote at Mobile World Congress, Schulman said: “We have the ability to make these transactions easier, faster, more secure and most importantly less expensive, which can make a real difference in the world.”

Those outside the financial system spend about 10 per cent of their disposable income on unnecessary fees and interest charges, which is the same percentage that a typical family spends on food.

“We should blow through the paradigm that it’s expensive to be poor. Our creed should be that managing and moving money should be a right of every citizen, and not just a privilege for the affluent,” he said.

Schulman said the democratising of money is an even bigger trend than the digitisation of commerce, the second huge trend that is defining the future of mobile.

PayPal is expanding its consumer platform because people are asking for more types of funding.

Consumers, he noted, have said they don’t want to have to buy a prepaid card just to put cash on the PayPal platform. It now allows them to put some of their salary directly on the platform, cash cheques onto the platform and use peer-to-peer services.

These moves and its partnerships within the financial services ecosystem are designed to make mobile phones “the central point of consumers’ financial lives”.

An example of this is an app it recently rolled out in 145 countries, in 27 languages, that not only uses biometrics on Android and iOS for authentication and security, but positions PayPal to go into a full omni-channel solution, he said.

Starting with Vodafone in Europe, customers can use their PayPal wallet for online and in-app check out, and later this year it will offer NFC capability in the US and Australia.

It also will allow users to check out with multiple POS options, such as barcodes, QR codes, beacons and NFC, because it recognises merchants have different technology considerations.